The story
Welcome to Portage Township
Portage Township takes its name from the ancient portage between the St. Joseph and the Kankakee, the carrying place used by La Salle in 1679. It is one of the county’s first townships, and since South Bend grew up inside it, its history has been mostly the city’s.
When the board of justices first divided the county on November 25, 1830, the eastern half was called Portage, Howard (1907) says, “from the old portage extending through the township from the St. Joseph to the Kankakee.” On May 6, 1832, Portage was redrawn as all of Range 2 East, and later townships carved it down, though six sections were added from Penn in 1836. Chapman (1880) describes it as Township 37 North, Range 2 East, four miles north and south by seven east and west, with the middle of its south side near the geographical center of the county. Apart from the Kankakee valley, Howard says, it is high and slightly rolling land.
The first settlers of the county were settlers of what is now Portage Township: Pierre Navarre in 1820, Alexis Coquillard in 1823 and Lathrop M. Taylor in 1827. The first churches and schoolhouses were in what became South Bend, and William McCartney built the county’s first flour mill in 1831, and soon after a tannery, on McCartney’s Creek a little below the city. At the back of today’s Riverview Cemetery, the Northern Indiana Historical Society set a marker in 1938 at the ravine where La Salle began his portage to the Kankakee on December 6, 1679.
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The town of South Bend was platted in 1831 and became the county seat that year, and as it grew it filled the township. Howard wrote in 1907 that the history of South Bend “will therefore substantially cover the history of Portage township.” By the census of 1900 the township had 36,896 people, 35,999 of them in the city and only 897 outside it.
South Bend fills much of the township today, and part of Notre Dame lies within it as well. Riverview and Highland cemeteries stand near each other on Portage Avenue, and the city’s museums at Washington and Chapin Streets. The 2020 census counted 94,571 people in Portage Township, more than any other township in the county.